In the film industry, companies work collaboratively on video clips for editing purposes. This is sometimes done in a video conference environment. In a video conference environment for performing an electronic conference through a communication network, a video conference system is provided in each of locations in which participants of a conference come together and a plurality of such video conference systems communicate via the communication network. Each video conference system collects image information and audio information in a location in which the conference system is provided. The image information and the audio information are synthesized and the synthesized information is distributed to the respective conference systems. In each conference system, the image information is displayed on a display device provided in the video conference system and the audio information is outputted through a loudspeaker also provided in the video conference system.
In the video conference environment, if individuals at different video conferencing systems wanted to watch a saved video clip together to edit/critique it, one site would have to send it to another site. This process involves multiple encode/decode steps which could lead to video quality degradation. Furthermore, the synchronization of the collaborative effort is problematic because each site only has control of the video clip that is running on it's respective system and none of the other systems.